Rainbow Six Vegas - hands-on

[PS3] We attempt to extinguish the massive outbreak of terror-born fires in Vegas

"Rainbow Six Vegas is about four things: tension, tactics, realism and close-quarters combat," announced Senior Producer Chaddi Lebbos at a recent hands-on event held by Ubisoft in Las Vegas itself. We got to wrap our itchy trigger fingers around this daring tactical shooter and we can verify that he was right to mention tension first.

"Hell has broken loose in Vegas," Chaddi continued, "we drew heavily on the hit television show 24 as a main reference, where appearances are not as they seem." As we fast-roped from a helicopter into an under-construction casino dubbed Dante's, the foreboding, debris-strewn site played its part well by hiding the raging terrorist operatives just waiting to put bullets into our team. It was dark, it was dirty and it was a tactical shooter-lover's dream landscape, full of make-shift cover for both us and our adversaries.

It didn't take long to realize that, without mastering the relatively simple "hold the left trigger" cover system, we were due for imminent perforation. Of course, if you click the Movies tab above and watch the video, you can see the exact opposite of the way we performed when given command of top-notch Team Rainbow. We were supposed to tell our two teammates where to go? Aw man, that would have made us much more effective...

Still, we hunkered down and let our two boys handle most of the tangos, which they were amazingly good at. Despite occasionally jumping into our lanes of fire, the other two members of our squad were stone cold killers.